But a new study by Tufts University suggests there’s an extra benefit to favouring wholegrains: eating them makes you lose more calories, thereby potentially helping you lose or manage your weight.

Study participants lost close to an extra 100 calories a day, energy equivalent to taking a brisk 30-minute walk or eating a small cookie.

To make this finding, Tufts researchers provided 81 men and women aged between 40 to 65 all their daily food for eight weeks. In the last six weeks the participants were randomly assigned one of two diets, which were identical except one diet included wholegrains and the other refined grains.

After the eight weeks was up, it was determined that the wholegrain eaters had boosted their resting metabolic rate — the energy your body uses to keep itself operating.

The extra calorie loss wasn’t just caused by the increased metabolic rate, but also by another and far grosser factor.

The participants who ate wholegrains had higher “faecal energy losses” — basically, their bodies absorbed less calories from the food they ate, meaning they pooped those calories out rather than using them for energy or potentially storing them as fat.

“[Wholegrain eaters] were going more, pooping more frequently and in larger volumes,” the study’s first author Dr Phil Karl told NBC News, because we all definitely needed to know that.

The research team said the faecal energy loss (which, by the way, is the perfect name for that punk rock band you’ve been thinking of forming) wasn’t due to the extra fibre in the wholegrains, but rather from the effect that fibre had on how other food calories were digested.

Another Tufts study published in tandem with the research turned up another (less disgusting) benefit of switching to wholegrains: it gives you a healthier gut microbiome, the collective name for the millions and millions of helper bacteria swirling around in your intestines.